22 ms·

Google to invest up to $2B in Anthropic

400 points by fofoz 3y ago

siquick 3y ago
Seems like an odd thing to do when all we’ve been hearing about for the last 10 years is how great Google’s AI capabilities are (“but you’re not allowed to actually see or use them”) - even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks ago.
- arkitaip 3y ago
  I think their primary goal is to make life difficult for OpenAI by investing in a competent competitor that brings a level of agility that Google just can't deliver.
- ritabratamaiti 3y ago
  Speculating... but maybe Anthropic is about to come up with something big
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Nope
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Can you maybe elaborate since you’re clearly in the know?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - refulgentis 3y ago
        No
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Simplest explanation is it was all PR hype.
  - schleck8 3y ago
    You are telling me Google Assistant and Alexa aren't sentient ASI?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      Let's not flatten the differences between ChatGPT and those (your humble source worked on Google Assistant and appreciates your kindness)
  - yreg 3y ago
    But Google did discover the tech the current AI craze is based on.
    - pzo 3y ago
      xerox as well invented computer mouse and GUI as we know it.
      - yreg 3y ago
        And you wouldn't accuse Xerox of doing "PR hype". Xerox did the exact opposite thing, they had not realized the value of research done in PARC.
    - m00x 3y ago
      Doesn't mean they know how to make it into a product.
      - tjpnz 3y ago
        A common failure mode for startups and a reminder of how universal those lessons are. Whether it would be the death knell of Google we'll have to wait a bit longer.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  Anthropic, like OpenAI, has a big lead in Google in terms of productization, but lags behind OpenAI in visibility, posing a big risk of OpenAI getting so much mindshare that even if Google were to catch up in productization, everyone in the market would already be tied ti what was visibly the only game in town. Helping fund Anthropic and assuring that there is visible competition also makes it more likely that LLM-backend-agnostic services will exist and a culture of evaluating offerings rather than just automatically going to OpenAI is established, which puts Google in a better position if they really are ahead in basic science and just suffering from a past lack of commeecialization focus that is remedied by the recent reorg and refocusing of Google’s AI efforts. (Also, it may help avoid the situation where Google’s lack of product and and the financial relationship between other cloud providers and the AI vendors that have competitive product means that Azure is the favored enterprise platform for OpenAI, Amazon works out something similar with Anthropic, and Google Cloud loses competitive position because Google AI isn’t competitive and Google doesn't have the right partnerships.)
  - infecto 3y ago
    Anthropic lacks more than visibility. I don’t know if it’s an issue with compute or leadership but it’s been really difficult getting access. Of course I guess you can run it on bedrock now? I signed for api access on Anthropics site maybe 6 months ago. Never any follow up, not even to tell me I can use bedrock to run it.
    - jasondclinton 3y ago
      Not sure how this happened, really sorry that this happened to you. Please reach out again, we've gotten through all of our backlog.
- lvl102 3y ago
  It could very well be that they lost the talent.
  - visarga 3y ago
    They lost most of top talent, it is their people who created OpenAI and Anthropic.
- zooq_ai 3y ago
  Google Cloud and Google DeepMind have different goals. The goal of Cloud is to sell as much compute as possible to the rest of the world. So, they want as many foundational models that are running on their cloud. Since OpenAI is married to Azure, Google and Amazon are trying hard to get the remaining. Of course GCP can just bet on Gemini, but if you are the head of GCP you wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. I mean the essence of cloud is redundancy and load distribution. It applies to business strategies too
  - Yoric 3y ago
    Interesting take. I was analyzing this as not putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of AI capabilities, but you are right that it's probably also true in terms of cloud sales.
- kromem 3y ago
  They are keeping the landscape from becoming too centralized around another direct competitor. Open AI is now basically Microsoft. Copilot in all your docs, etc. If only Amazon was the large investor in Anthropic it encourages a similar exclusive partnership to develop where Anthropic ends up powering Alexa with proprietary access to its SotA models. Google throwing money that way keeps Anthropic from becoming too siloed into a partnership with one cloud direct competitor, and also helps fund another competitor to the company in the lead who is partnered with a different cloud direct competitor. I wouldn't read into it beyond that, and certainly not in thinking this reflects product shortcomings or advantages.
- TuringNYC 3y ago
  1. OpenAI is too large a supplier for LLMs, and they are trying to create supplier diversity 2. $2B is a drop in the bucket for Google. Even after the severe fall this month, the Google Market Cap is $1.536 Trillion. Consider the investment as a % of market cap 3. It is undeniable that small players can move fast, so even if Google's AI is amazing, the slope is probably not as high as a fast moving startup 4. These products have 2nd order revenue boosters -- you might use Anthropic's marketplace app, as a theoretical example, but you end up spending much more on compute/storage/cloud in doing so, helping the cloud majors
  - HNDen21 3y ago
    I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap since Google doesn't own all that market cap... I would consider the non float shares + short term investments + cash on hand or Revenue/Profit better
    - WrongAssumption 3y ago
      Not seeing how that distinction matters. Google’s owners (shareholders) do own all that. And google represents the collective financial interests of the shareholders.
      - staticman2 3y ago
        Google's shareholders own stock. Nothing more nothing less.
    - sangnoir 3y ago
      > I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap since Google doesn't own all that market cap. Market cap does matter because you can use it to gauge how easily Google could hypothetically raise the same amount[1] by issuing additional shares without a shareholder revolt. 1. Or complete an all-stock deal or acquisition.
- state_less 3y ago
  It's not odd, this is how big capital extends itself into the future. Alphabet and Amazon are giant tech conglomerates that have been doing this for years. Alphabet bought Youtube, Android, DoubleClick, DeepMind, Maps, etc. Plenty of things, and maybe the best things people think of when they think of Google are actually bought from the marketplace and integrated into the giant. They buy whatever they want that might help their cause. This quarter alone Alphabet's free cash flow is $22B. This is a small bet for them. Why wouldn't they spend a small fraction in a key area for them?
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    And that is why they should have been broken up many years ago. The lack of teeth of us anti competitive laws goes against capitalism.
    - jdgoesmarching 3y ago
      What. Deploying capital to make investments is the central conceit of capitalism. It’s right there on the tin.
    - Yoric 3y ago
      I don't feel that capitalism is an end to be pursued, but I agree that these conglomerates should be broken, for the sake of avoiding irreversible concentration of power.
      - naillo 3y ago
        Not really irreversible unless they get a monopoly on violence, so as long as the overton window from the publics perspective shifts dominantly towards breaking them up in the future we'll be able to get a better situation.
        troyvit 3y ago
        They (search, social media, advertising companies) are gaining a monopoly on truth. With that they indirectly control the government, which is the one with the monopoly on violence.
- SanderNL 3y ago
  This is the only thing they can do. They don’t produce anything. They buy. Their AI is a joke and all they earn money on is ads. MS is beating them on the AI front, hard, and they have multiple interesting avenues like having an actual OS, basically all the world’s code and all the world’s business. 2B is too little too late as well. It’s almost embarrassing. MS dumped 10B into OpenAI. 2B is a lukewarm, visionless move.
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    I don’t think 2B is too little. Anthropic already has a competitive LLM they lack a competitive dataset I think and need to scale. 2B can allow them to do this. I don’t know that Google wants Claude to be theirs they just don’t want Microsoft to own the generative AI market
  - _cs2017_ 3y ago
    Why do you say that MS beating Google on AI? OpenAI is not part of MS (49% ownership is nice but it doesn't give MS control of the company). MS by itself doesn't own any of foundational models competitive with Google. MS has a solid AI research team, but it's not ahead of Google DeepMind. Microsoft Azure beats Google Cloud, but I don't think you count GPU rentals as AI? If MS actually bought OpenAI, it would be a different story.
  - visarga 3y ago
    Looks like Google has better hardware for AI than anyone else, and they are the only company having both AI research and AI hardware. OpenAI+Microsoft and Anthropic+Amazon are much less integrated, working at arms length. > Google will have multiple very large clusters across their infrastructure for training and by far the lowest cost per inference, but this won’t automatically grant them the keys to the kingdom. If the battle is just access to compute resources, Google would crush both OpenAI and Anthropic. > Being “GPU-rich” alone does not mean the battle is over. Google will have multiple different clusters larger than their competitors, so they can afford to make mistakes with pretraining and trying more differing architectures. What OpenAI and Anthropic lack in compute, they have to make up in research efficiency, focus, and execution. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-pill-or-empire https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-pill-...
- makestuff 3y ago
  In addition to what others have said about them having so much capital to invest, another angle is that AI is a hot topic right now. It is a much worse PR headline for it to come out that Google’s AI did something bad. If a headline comes out that Anthropic’s model did something bad, very few people will connect the dots to Anthropic’s investors.
- ta988 3y ago
  They are starting to let people try their "capabilities" and it isnt great from having tried them.
- datadeft 3y ago
  It is a diversification bet I guess.
- cushychicken 3y ago
  When you’re pulling down $15 billion in profits a quarter, it’s not nuts to drop a chunk on an opportunity that might end up winning the whole market. Safe hedge imo.
- lr1970 3y ago
  > even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks ago. Amazon invested not $1.5B but $4B in Anthropic one month ago [0]. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-race-with-up-4-billion-deal-invest-anthropic-2023-09-25/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-rac...
- modeless 3y ago
  Isn't this just laundering money into the cloud division? GOOG was decimated after the last earnings call by poor cloud results. This is at least a billion in revenue for Google Cloud, right?
- ttul 3y ago
  They are buying upside and they are funding a competitor to OpenAI and Microsoft. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. There are only so many groups in AI that have the chops to take on OpenAI and Anthropic is one of them - if not the most promising.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
garblegarble 3y ago
I can't understand the mindset of any AI researchers who stay at Google at this point. You're there (presumably) because you want to make an impact. You gave them a massive lead with a novel approach... and Google failed to capitalise on that so spectacularly that they're now investing billions into their competitor who's miles ahead of Google, using Google's approach, all to try and head off another competitor who's miles ahead of everybody also using Google's approach I hope that (counter to stories) they pay the researchers very well, because the best result I can see is Google shutting down what they can publish to try and stop this happening again.
- ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
  It is also a testament to what happens when you open up powerful technology instead of hoarding
- londons_explore 3y ago
  Most researchers aren't there to make a commercial product. They're there to publish well-cited research papers, talk at top conferences, and have access to far more compute than anyone else can offer to have the biggest chance at state-of-the-art results. In terms of FLOPS, Google is rumoured to be by far the biggest, since they have lots of their own silicon, while most other people are limited by what NVidia can make or smallish amounts of custom silicon. If Google can't turn that into a commercial product, the researchers don't really care.
  - garblegarble 3y ago
    >Most researchers aren't there to make a commercial product. They're there to publish well-cited research papers, talk at top conferences, and have access to far more compute than anyone else can offer. I think that's core to what I'm getting at - I don't see how Google continues to let them publish core research at this point given how much of a lead they've given their competitors (especially combined with their own inability to execute)
    - leereeves 3y ago
Karupan 3y ago
Is this google indirectly admitting that it cannot compete in the current AI landscape (e.g bard), or is it just to keep OpenAI in check by funding its closest competitor?
- teleforce 3y ago
  Really surprised that Google didn't outright buy OpenAI perhaps the price is already too much now even for Google. Previously, Google has no problem buying direct competitors to its products for example Youtube and Waze. ChatGPT with Bing search is just very good, intuitive and convenient that I highly recommend it if you have not tried it. Imagine a version of ChatGPT that has tight integration with Google Search, Google Scholar, Google Patent, Google Books, Google Deepmind, etc. Early last year or so I've read that people were lamenting on how Google at the time was struggling to monetize Deepmind products and suddenly OpenAI ChatGPT 3 came and changed the game forever, while the game changing algorithm is right under their nose, so to speak. It's quite telling that none of the original authors of the Attention paper is still with Google for now. To showcase the powerful nature of ChatGPT 4 with Bing search I've queried where the original authors of the Attention paper are working now and the answers are as follows: "As of 2023, here are the current affiliations or recent activities of the original authors of the "Attention is All You Need" paper: Ashish Vaswani: Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Adept AI Noam Shazeer: Co-founder and CEO of Character.AI Niki Parmar: While there isn't specific information about Niki Parmar's current affiliation, it's known that both Vaswani and Parmar were authors at Google when the paper was published in 2017 Jakob Uszkoreit: CEO and co-founder of Inceptive Nucleics, Inc Llion Jones: Left Google Japan in July 2023 to launch a startup, Sakana AI, alongside David Ha, the former head of Google's AI research arm in Japan Aidan N. Gomez: CEO & Co-founder of Cohere, a company focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lukasz Kaiser: The search for Lukasz Kaiser's current affiliation did not yield relevant results. Further research may be required to find his current affiliation. It's also noted that many of the co-authors have left Google to start their own ventures or joined other organizations since the publication of the paper."
  - vitus 3y ago
    > Lukasz Kaiser: The search for Lukasz Kaiser's current affiliation did not yield relevant results. Further research may be required to find his current affiliation. The Lukasz Kaiser who's been at OpenAI since 2021? https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser I know it's popular on HN to give Google crap about having bad search results these days and to use ChatGPT instead, but this was literally the first Google search result for me. IMO it's especially embarrassing that Bing (owned by Microsoft) was unable to find Lukasz Kaiser via LinkedIn (also owned by Microsoft). That said: native Bing Search gets it right: Lukasz Kaiser | LinkedIn Connections: 500+ Followers: 5.3K Works For: OpenAI (obligatory disclaimer that Google pays me money in exchange for work that has nothing to do with AI/ML, so let that inform how you read my post)
kleene_op 3y ago
Those who can't do.. pay.
jsemrau 3y ago
I guess the main driver here is gaining control / influence ?
rawrawrawrr 3y ago
$6 billion dollars raised in 2 months for their series C is blowing my mind. What does Anthropic have that OpenAI or other LLM startups don't? What other companies have raised that much in a single round?
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Gotta be the talent. Started by ex-OpenAI and probably attracted some AI geniuses who buy in to their safety approach too.
  - mptest 3y ago
    joking, but maybe they have achieved agi (internally) ;)
    - schleck8 3y ago
      OpenAI is said to have done so by a guy who leaked some very specific information that turned out to be accurate.
- Varloom 3y ago
  It's absolutely good, have you tried their Claude 2 AI?
  - polymorph1sm 3y ago
    It’s not as good as GPT-4, the only feature I used often was their PDF QA. The rest ChatGPT plus ( GPT-4 ) still miles ahead
    - lambdaba 3y ago
      I regularly compare queries with both GPT-4 and Claude 2 and I find I prefer Claude's answers most often. The 100k token context is a major plus too. Claude is more creative and that comes with a higher rate of hallucinations. I hope I'm not misremembering but GPT-4 was also initially more prone to hallucinations but also more capable in some ways.
throwaway2990 3y ago
They don’t have much confidence. Microsoft invested 10b into OpenAI. That investment seems to be paying off well.
cryptoz 3y ago
Can’t risk losing the AI war entirely. Much better to be embarrassed to the tune of $2B than to have no profits from future AI success.
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simonswords82 3y ago
I'd love to see the statistics on the daily number of Google searches since OpenAI (ChatGPT in particular) came to the fore this year. Anecdotally, I now use ChatGPT for at least 25-50% of the queries that I previously would have had no other channel for other than a search engine. If I was in charge of Alphabet I'd be starting to worry. This move makes them look a bit desperate.
- dalbasal 3y ago
  The types of queries where gpt is useful (or I hope will soon be useful) to me are those where google themselves have "destroyed the internet.^" If you want to basic information about a physical exercise, a recipe, a travel destination or such... All the content in Google seems to be content farmed. Written by people who don't know, quickly, by copying similar articles. It's just a buggy, manual version of the proverbial gpt anyway. At this point, I may as well just go direct. If I want to know about doing weighted crunches instead of sit ups, Google results already represent all the downsides of using gpt. The got UI is nicer. You can also narrow in on your questions, push back and generally get the same level of content in a better package. Maybe the old chestnut of "computerized recipe book" will finally be solved. ^Ra Ra!
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > All the content in Google seems to be content farmed you are just forgetting to add word "reddit" at the end of your query..
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      That doesn’t help and is just as astroturfed at this point. Companies caught on to this years ago
      - riku_iki 3y ago
        that's very far from my experience, mods and voting community do great job in ranking good posts and comments. Maybe you can give example of your query which you are not satisfied with results?
soniman 3y ago
FTX Anthropic worth a lot now or has it been diluted ?
- crypt1d 3y ago
  Worth a lot. It probably would have been enough to plug the hole from stealing customer funds, if he managed to stay afloat for a few more months. Ah, the irony.
  - k4rli 3y ago
    What happened to their shares? Just sold to cover claims?
    - crypt1d 3y ago
      from what I know, they still have their stake, but they will eventually sell it
  - diamondfist25 3y ago
    Hope ftx bankruptcy CEO can make it whole for the customers. 80% of my nw is stuck there
    - edgyquant 3y ago
      Why is 80% of your net worth in FTX
Varloom 3y ago
That means all the work they did on their own AI has failed. So they are buying someone else's AI.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Or it means they have more money than they know what to do with so they're throwing it at any de-risking they can find
Bishonen88 3y ago
Funny, seeing that Amazon seems to be dipping their toes in the same water. https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-collaboration-to-advance-generative-ai https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-an...
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  It’s about as close as one can get to an acquisition, no?
- mrkramer 3y ago
  Didn't Amazon invest in Google in the Google's early days? Now Google is returning the favor by saying: "Look FTC and DOJ, we are not a monopolist, web users prefer Amazon over Google when they search for products to buy."
foxhop 3y ago
I'm using LLMs at my day job and claude v2 getting close to gpt-4's intelligence. It does use a different prompting style and has a huge 100,000 context window so it expects multishot prompting to train the LLM just-in-time.
- lambdaba 3y ago
  I've recently subscribed too. The huge context window is a game-changer and I can't wait for API access. Unfortunately it hallucinates a lot. It's amazing for extracting information out of large documents, altough doing so made me realize how limited current models are in terms of detecting "subtleties" that would be obvious to a human.
  - foxhop 3y ago
    I have API access using AWS Bedrock which is hosted claude v2. boto3 has a client to trigger the completions but I've been practicing using just the playground in AWS console.
    - lambdaba 3y ago
      Thanks, I've requested access, how long did it take for you? Update: access already granted!
- lambdaba 3y ago
  BTW what do you mean by "different prompting style"?
  - foxhop 3y ago
    https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt
  - foxhop 3y ago
    Human: I have a message and I need to categorize it into the right bucket. Can you help? General Inquiry Feedback & Suggestions Technical Issues Billing & Payments Appointments & Scheduling Others return only JSON like {"category": "Technical Issues"} Assistant: Sure using just JSON! Human: The app freezes every time I launch it. Assistant: {"category": "Technical Issues"} Human: I think your platform could use a night mode feature. Assistant: {"category": "Feedback & Suggestions"} Human: How do I reschedule my consultation? Assistant: {"category": "Appointments & Scheduling"} Human: I don't like the new open layout. Assistant: {"category": "Feedback & Suggestions"}
LightBug1 3y ago
I'm confused. Ok, Bard isn't cutting edge but it's pretty damned good for every day stuff ... and I actually detest Google ... but I've been using it because I'm sick of Edge on my PC and I think the UI is just 'friendlier' and quicker. N=1
- deleted 3y ago
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- nacs 3y ago
  Sorry but Bard is terrible and Google knows it. They've already announced a replacement / better model coming but considering how long Google has been doing the AI thing, it's amazing they dropped the ball this badly. This investment is Claude sounds like their backup plan.
  - fastball 3y ago
    Google literally invented the Transformer architecture, so yes, an impressive dropping of the ball.
- wenc 3y ago
  If you've used the competition (ChatGPT, Claude, even Perplexity free version), you will find that Bard is not good in terms of quality of answers. (I'm forced to use Bard at work. The UI is responsive I'll give you that, but the answers are often more wrong than ChatGPT and Claude)
- staticman2 3y ago
  Bard is so stupid that I tried the take a picture feature, asked a question about a picture, then when I asked a followup question about the picture it said "Sorry I can't look at pictures." I do expect it to get much smarter by the end of next year.
  - antifa 3y ago
    I asked bard to make a comparison chart of OpenAI, Claude, and PaLM's specs (size and context window) and it repeatedly gave me a nice looking table with obviously wrong values.
qwertox 3y ago
Can't wait for the day where it makes sense to export all my ChatGPT history and import it into Google's competition product in order for them to customize my experience. At this point Google is offering nothing which comes close to ChatGPT, Bard is a laughing stock compared to it. But I don't doubt that Google will catch up and then offer a better experience. The only thing OpenAI has from me is that (valuable) chat history (and the monthly subscription money), so I wouldn't have any problems with moving away from them once they are no longer in the unique position they're currently in. This is different with Google, which has several orders of magnitude more data about me and which they also do manage for me. I'm concerned that it's only a matter of time until OpenAi gets hacked and some of the user account's data gets leaked.
- ep_jhu 3y ago
  There’s already been hacks with 100k user account data leaked: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-100-000-chatgpt-accounts-stolen-via-info-stealing-malware/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-100-000-... OpenAI says it was an issue with the user devices not their service, though.
  - deleted 3y ago
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- k4rli 3y ago
  What's the actual big gain of having history? I have it enabled as well and I sometimes jump back into old chats but it's mostly not so useful.
  - kmlx 3y ago
    the big gain is for long running queries. i had to refactor a big codebase and i went back to the same conversation numerous times over the course of a month. of course it would sometimes lose context, but having it all in the same place made things very easy for me.
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- GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
  That's not really that high, maybe for the UK, but again not unheard of
  - calderknight 3y ago
    It's very, very high for the UK, but pretty normal for the USA.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      For a remote IT job? It’s not unheard of, but no that’s not normal (I guess depending on what “IT job” actually means).
      - kjkjadksj 3y ago
        When I hear IT job I imagine moving 12 dell desktops on a moving cart across a campus for $50k a year
        ravetcofx 3y ago
        For 250k I imagine it's a very stressful sysAdmin/DevOps position where they're expected to be Jack of all trades.
        ethanbond 3y ago
        Or it’s a startup with shitloads of cash that’s willing to overpay, as indicated by the person’s immediately preceding salary.
      - deleted 3y ago
Taranis 3y ago
Amazon recently annouced their investment in Anthropic as well. Two, of the largest ad providers on the planet. Invest in the competition so you can have "input" into various aspects of the company, all the while profitting on any sucess.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I generally agree with this sentiment, but Anthropic has agency and have deemed it acceptable to grant these companies some control.
  - ttul 3y ago
    There may be some interest in having access to Google’s machine learning hardware as well. What we don’t know publicly is the extent of any deals these companies have to share technology and infrastructure. Google is one of the only hyperscalers to have succeeded in building its own ML hardware. That’s a key asset.
HlessClaudesman 3y ago
Amzoogle. Coining it here for the benefit of our future Amzooverlords.
- javajosh 3y ago
  "Googazon" has a better ring to it, IMHO.
  - mmmm2 3y ago
    Seems to capture the scale and ridiculousness as well.
    - pxeger1 3y ago
      Amagongle?
  - wseqyrku 3y ago
    Ok, Amzoogoogazongle
    - malfist 3y ago
      One of amazon's leadership principles is "Think Big" why stop at amazon and google? I propose Amzoogoogazonglezure. Don't ask me how to pronounce it.
    - javajosh 3y ago
      Or perhaps AmazonGoogleKleinerPerkinsKlaxoGoldmanSachs GmbH
  - hughesjj 3y ago
    "alphazon" "Amabet"
neom 3y ago
Wonder if Anthropic could end up making FTX shareholders whole given SBF invested quite bit into them a while ago.
- olalonde 3y ago
  That and the crypto bull market. Imagine being SBF and knowing you could have avoided decades in jail if only you hadn't filed for bankruptcy.
  - valyagolev 3y ago
    this happened to him several times, and each time he ended up betting it all again. if anthropic would make him whole, he'd bet it all on more bullshit crypto
  - da-bacon 3y ago
    If you rob a bank and then win the lottery, you still robbed the bank.
    - loeg 3y ago
      Yeah, but also, if the hole is $0 vs $8 billion, you probably get less jail time.
      - fastball 3y ago
        Don't be too sure, that's not how it played out for Martin Shkreli.
        loeg 3y ago
        We can never know the outcome of the counterfactual scenario for Shkreli.
    - chipgap98 3y ago
      Totally agree but it is a strange situation. Everyone will probably be made whole now
danielovichdk 3y ago
Does anyone know what clauses OpenAI workers work under in terms of competition trying to pick them up and win them over? I still don't see any competition to what openai has done and so I expect some heavy rivalry coming up
xyst 3y ago
I wonder what the burn rate is for these AI companies. $2b is a shit ton of money but I can easily see it quickly draining with a large team of devs, data scientists, SREs, and misc costs such as specialty hardware and cloud costs.
- skizm 3y ago
  There was an article a while ago about how it costs OpenAI around $700,000 per day to operate. Could be north of $1M / day now.
  - fastball 3y ago
    That's still only $365M per year – $2B would last you 5+ years.
  - lukevp 3y ago
    Even at $1M/day, the 3 billion from Amazon and Google would last 3000 days, which is ~8.2 years. Nothing to sneeze at! And that’s assuming they make no money themselves, which would extend the runway. A billion is a lot of money. I always accidentally think of it as 100 million instead of a thousand million for some reason.
  - kubrickslair 3y ago
    They are also have a $1B+ annual run rate [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-track-generate-more-than-1-bln-revenue-over-12-months-information-2023-08-29/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-track-generate-mor...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - typon 3y ago
    Even though 1M/day sounds like a lot, $10B (their funding from Microsoft) would last them 27 years at this rate.
- gtirloni 3y ago
  Right now, it's mostly hardware costs.
mechanicker 3y ago
Could it be more to prevent monopoly by their competitor Amazon becoming the biggest investor? OpenAI gave Microsoft a competitive edge and this could just be a hedge to prevent Amazon from getting even further ahead.
johnwheeler 3y ago
Google and their also-ran AI. Pichai is the lame duck CEO, Brin and Page are the lame duck founders. Hassabis is a lego nerd. Company hasn’t done shit but shutter products and piss people off, and the search engine is working about as good as AltaVista circa 1999. Google employees downvoting me
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  I don't get how Pichai isn't in the crosshairs right now, he must be good at bullshitting the board and shareholders, because things have very clearly been going downhill under his leadership.
Andrew018 3y ago
[dead]
ta988 3y ago
They have no choice their internal models are just ridiculously bad compared to OpenAI. The behemoth is so fat it can't move anymore, this doesn't sound good for the company as a whole and the only thing that keep them afloat is that they are paying to be the default on devices.
grammers 3y ago
Google paid $26 billion in 2021 to become the default search engine on browsers and phones - $2B is peanuts to them.
riku_iki 3y ago
Anthropic will be interesting company if founders lost voting power in the board, with FTX, Amazon and Google representatives arguing to each other on key decisions protecting their interests.
- jasondclinton 3y ago
  We announced our board structure here: https://www.anthropic.com/index/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://www.anthropic.com/index/the-long-term-benefit-trust Quoting: """The Trust is an independent body of five financially disinterested members with an authority to select and remove a portion of our Board that will grow over time (ultimately, a majority of our Board). Paired with our Public Benefit Corporation status, the LTBT helps to align our corporate governance with our mission of developing and maintaining advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."""
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    > to select and remove a portion of our Board and how large is that portion?
- caddemon 3y ago
  Who is the FTX representative at this point?
  - riku_iki 3y ago
    there is some custodian of their assets for sure.
nextworddev 3y ago
If anything this is a signal that there’s hiccups with Gemini GA or performance
outside1234 3y ago
So the internal effort to build a competitive AI product are going well?
Jackson__ 3y ago
Huh, this together with their "Gemini" AI product still not being released does not paint a good picture of progress at the Google DeepMind Team.
- donor20 3y ago
  Are they the ones doing Bard? I’ve got a ChatGPT subscription but interested in trying googles product but it says my workspace hadn’t enabled bard yet
  - gzer0 3y ago
    You should be able to use Bard with a non-workspace account. Any personal gmail/google account should be able to go directly to https://bard.google.com https://bard.google.com and agree to the terms and enroll.
    - scrivna 3y ago
      Claude nor Bard are available in Canada shrug
slowhadoken 3y ago
I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park rn
taf2 3y ago
I hope anthropic improves their api with this money. Having usage information from OpenAI is very nice. Their ai is really good just need to improve their features to support commercial usage
gzer0 3y ago
In my experience, claude.ai outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT in several key areas. Notably, claude.ai excels in long-tail document reading and recall, demonstrating superior comprehension and information retrieval. Additionally, claude.ai offers enhanced contextual understanding, allowing it to provide more relevant and precise responses. However, while Claude.ai certainly showcases its strengths in specific areas, it doesn't quite measure up to OpenAI's ChatGPT in terms of adaptability and precision. ChatGPT stands out for its capability to understand intricate queries and produce nuanced, tailored responses. Both platforms have distinct strengths; I firmly believe they'll evolve to dominate different niches in the AI ecosystem.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  I’ve had the opposite experience. Soon after claude 2 came out, i pasted in a long document that started with the document’s title and it couldn’t answer a “what is the title?” question.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > In my experience, claude.ai outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT in several key areas. ChatGPT on GPT-3.5? I can buy this. GPT-4? No fucking way. If Claude got anywhere close, this would be front page news in every tech and tech-adjacent outlet. This has to be said again and again: "ChatGPT" is meaningless without specifying whether you mean GPT-3.5 or GPT-4; statements about "ChatGPT" (or LLMs in general) capability limits are invalid unless tested on GPT-4.
  - gzer0 3y ago
    I have been using GPT since the inception of GPT-2. You're correct, I should have specified. I rarely if ever use GPT-3.5. I have 7 paid / premium accounts, and I primarily use GPT-4.
  - tadfisher 3y ago
    OpenAI does this disservice to themselves by paywalling GPT-4 and not 3.5, under the umbrella of "ChatGPT".
  - 3y ago
nuancebydefault 3y ago
Even though Claude sounds French, it seems it is not directly accessible from European countries? I'd love to give it a spin.
xmglgpeldmg 3y ago
Is there any significance in Google proper making the investment rather than another arm of Alphabet?
jklinger410 3y ago
Anthropic and Claude are signals to me that Artificial Intelligence will be a captured technology before it actually becomes useful. Google investing in Anthropic shows that their priorities are on the capture over the usefulness. Because that's all that Claude really is.

400 points by fofoz 3y ago

Seems like an odd thing to do when all we’ve been hearing about for the last 10 years is how great Google’s AI capabilities are (“but you’re not allowed to actually see or use them”) - even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks ago.

arkitaip 3y ago
I think their primary goal is to make life difficult for OpenAI by investing in a competent competitor that brings a level of agility that Google just can't deliver.
ritabratamaiti 3y ago
Speculating... but maybe Anthropic is about to come up with something big
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Nope
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Can you maybe elaborate since you’re clearly in the know?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - refulgentis 3y ago
      No
tjpnz 3y ago
Simplest explanation is it was all PR hype.
- schleck8 3y ago
  You are telling me Google Assistant and Alexa aren't sentient ASI?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    Let's not flatten the differences between ChatGPT and those (your humble source worked on Google Assistant and appreciates your kindness)
- yreg 3y ago
  But Google did discover the tech the current AI craze is based on.
  - pzo 3y ago
    xerox as well invented computer mouse and GUI as we know it.
    - yreg 3y ago
      And you wouldn't accuse Xerox of doing "PR hype". Xerox did the exact opposite thing, they had not realized the value of research done in PARC.
  - m00x 3y ago
    Doesn't mean they know how to make it into a product.
    - tjpnz 3y ago
      A common failure mode for startups and a reminder of how universal those lessons are. Whether it would be the death knell of Google we'll have to wait a bit longer.
dragonwriter 3y ago
Anthropic, like OpenAI, has a big lead in Google in terms of productization, but lags behind OpenAI in visibility, posing a big risk of OpenAI getting so much mindshare that even if Google were to catch up in productization, everyone in the market would already be tied ti what was visibly the only game in town. Helping fund Anthropic and assuring that there is visible competition also makes it more likely that LLM-backend-agnostic services will exist and a culture of evaluating offerings rather than just automatically going to OpenAI is established, which puts Google in a better position if they really are ahead in basic science and just suffering from a past lack of commeecialization focus that is remedied by the recent reorg and refocusing of Google’s AI efforts. (Also, it may help avoid the situation where Google’s lack of product and and the financial relationship between other cloud providers and the AI vendors that have competitive product means that Azure is the favored enterprise platform for OpenAI, Amazon works out something similar with Anthropic, and Google Cloud loses competitive position because Google AI isn’t competitive and Google doesn't have the right partnerships.)
- infecto 3y ago
  Anthropic lacks more than visibility. I don’t know if it’s an issue with compute or leadership but it’s been really difficult getting access. Of course I guess you can run it on bedrock now? I signed for api access on Anthropics site maybe 6 months ago. Never any follow up, not even to tell me I can use bedrock to run it.
  - jasondclinton 3y ago
    Not sure how this happened, really sorry that this happened to you. Please reach out again, we've gotten through all of our backlog.
lvl102 3y ago
It could very well be that they lost the talent.
- visarga 3y ago
  They lost most of top talent, it is their people who created OpenAI and Anthropic.
zooq_ai 3y ago
Google Cloud and Google DeepMind have different goals. The goal of Cloud is to sell as much compute as possible to the rest of the world. So, they want as many foundational models that are running on their cloud. Since OpenAI is married to Azure, Google and Amazon are trying hard to get the remaining. Of course GCP can just bet on Gemini, but if you are the head of GCP you wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. I mean the essence of cloud is redundancy and load distribution. It applies to business strategies too
- Yoric 3y ago
  Interesting take. I was analyzing this as not putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of AI capabilities, but you are right that it's probably also true in terms of cloud sales.
kromem 3y ago
They are keeping the landscape from becoming too centralized around another direct competitor. Open AI is now basically Microsoft. Copilot in all your docs, etc. If only Amazon was the large investor in Anthropic it encourages a similar exclusive partnership to develop where Anthropic ends up powering Alexa with proprietary access to its SotA models. Google throwing money that way keeps Anthropic from becoming too siloed into a partnership with one cloud direct competitor, and also helps fund another competitor to the company in the lead who is partnered with a different cloud direct competitor. I wouldn't read into it beyond that, and certainly not in thinking this reflects product shortcomings or advantages.
TuringNYC 3y ago
1. OpenAI is too large a supplier for LLMs, and they are trying to create supplier diversity 2. $2B is a drop in the bucket for Google. Even after the severe fall this month, the Google Market Cap is $1.536 Trillion. Consider the investment as a % of market cap 3. It is undeniable that small players can move fast, so even if Google's AI is amazing, the slope is probably not as high as a fast moving startup 4. These products have 2nd order revenue boosters -- you might use Anthropic's marketplace app, as a theoretical example, but you end up spending much more on compute/storage/cloud in doing so, helping the cloud majors
- HNDen21 3y ago
  I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap since Google doesn't own all that market cap... I would consider the non float shares + short term investments + cash on hand or Revenue/Profit better
  - WrongAssumption 3y ago
    Not seeing how that distinction matters. Google’s owners (shareholders) do own all that. And google represents the collective financial interests of the shareholders.
    - staticman2 3y ago
      Google's shareholders own stock. Nothing more nothing less.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > I would not consider the investment as a % of market cap since Google doesn't own all that market cap. Market cap does matter because you can use it to gauge how easily Google could hypothetically raise the same amount[1] by issuing additional shares without a shareholder revolt. 1. Or complete an all-stock deal or acquisition.
state_less 3y ago
It's not odd, this is how big capital extends itself into the future. Alphabet and Amazon are giant tech conglomerates that have been doing this for years. Alphabet bought Youtube, Android, DoubleClick, DeepMind, Maps, etc. Plenty of things, and maybe the best things people think of when they think of Google are actually bought from the marketplace and integrated into the giant. They buy whatever they want that might help their cause. This quarter alone Alphabet's free cash flow is $22B. This is a small bet for them. Why wouldn't they spend a small fraction in a key area for them?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  And that is why they should have been broken up many years ago. The lack of teeth of us anti competitive laws goes against capitalism.
  - jdgoesmarching 3y ago
    What. Deploying capital to make investments is the central conceit of capitalism. It’s right there on the tin.
  - Yoric 3y ago
    I don't feel that capitalism is an end to be pursued, but I agree that these conglomerates should be broken, for the sake of avoiding irreversible concentration of power.
    - naillo 3y ago
      Not really irreversible unless they get a monopoly on violence, so as long as the overton window from the publics perspective shifts dominantly towards breaking them up in the future we'll be able to get a better situation.
      - troyvit 3y ago
        They (search, social media, advertising companies) are gaining a monopoly on truth. With that they indirectly control the government, which is the one with the monopoly on violence.
SanderNL 3y ago
This is the only thing they can do. They don’t produce anything. They buy. Their AI is a joke and all they earn money on is ads. MS is beating them on the AI front, hard, and they have multiple interesting avenues like having an actual OS, basically all the world’s code and all the world’s business. 2B is too little too late as well. It’s almost embarrassing. MS dumped 10B into OpenAI. 2B is a lukewarm, visionless move.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  I don’t think 2B is too little. Anthropic already has a competitive LLM they lack a competitive dataset I think and need to scale. 2B can allow them to do this. I don’t know that Google wants Claude to be theirs they just don’t want Microsoft to own the generative AI market
- _cs2017_ 3y ago
  Why do you say that MS beating Google on AI? OpenAI is not part of MS (49% ownership is nice but it doesn't give MS control of the company). MS by itself doesn't own any of foundational models competitive with Google. MS has a solid AI research team, but it's not ahead of Google DeepMind. Microsoft Azure beats Google Cloud, but I don't think you count GPU rentals as AI? If MS actually bought OpenAI, it would be a different story.
- visarga 3y ago
  Looks like Google has better hardware for AI than anyone else, and they are the only company having both AI research and AI hardware. OpenAI+Microsoft and Anthropic+Amazon are much less integrated, working at arms length. > Google will have multiple very large clusters across their infrastructure for training and by far the lowest cost per inference, but this won’t automatically grant them the keys to the kingdom. If the battle is just access to compute resources, Google would crush both OpenAI and Anthropic. > Being “GPU-rich” alone does not mean the battle is over. Google will have multiple different clusters larger than their competitors, so they can afford to make mistakes with pretraining and trying more differing architectures. What OpenAI and Anthropic lack in compute, they have to make up in research efficiency, focus, and execution. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-pill-or-empire https://www.semianalysis.com/p/amazon-anthropic-poison-pill-...
makestuff 3y ago
In addition to what others have said about them having so much capital to invest, another angle is that AI is a hot topic right now. It is a much worse PR headline for it to come out that Google’s AI did something bad. If a headline comes out that Anthropic’s model did something bad, very few people will connect the dots to Anthropic’s investors.
ta988 3y ago
They are starting to let people try their "capabilities" and it isnt great from having tried them.
datadeft 3y ago
It is a diversification bet I guess.
cushychicken 3y ago
When you’re pulling down $15 billion in profits a quarter, it’s not nuts to drop a chunk on an opportunity that might end up winning the whole market. Safe hedge imo.
lr1970 3y ago
> even more so when Amazon just invested $1.5B in Anthropic a few weeks ago. Amazon invested not $1.5B but $4B in Anthropic one month ago [0]. [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-race-with-up-4-billion-deal-invest-anthropic-2023-09-25/ https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/amazon-steps-up-ai-rac...
modeless 3y ago
Isn't this just laundering money into the cloud division? GOOG was decimated after the last earnings call by poor cloud results. This is at least a billion in revenue for Google Cloud, right?
ttul 3y ago
They are buying upside and they are funding a competitor to OpenAI and Microsoft. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. There are only so many groups in AI that have the chops to take on OpenAI and Anthropic is one of them - if not the most promising.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

garblegarble 3y ago

I can't understand the mindset of any AI researchers who stay at Google at this point. You're there (presumably) because you want to make an impact. You gave them a massive lead with a novel approach... and Google failed to capitalise on that so spectacularly that they're now investing billions into their competitor who's miles ahead of Google, using Google's approach, all to try and head off another competitor who's miles ahead of everybody also using Google's approach I hope that (counter to stories) they pay the researchers very well, because the best result I can see is Google shutting down what they can publish to try and stop this happening again.

ikekkdcjkfke 3y ago
It is also a testament to what happens when you open up powerful technology instead of hoarding
londons_explore 3y ago
Most researchers aren't there to make a commercial product. They're there to publish well-cited research papers, talk at top conferences, and have access to far more compute than anyone else can offer to have the biggest chance at state-of-the-art results. In terms of FLOPS, Google is rumoured to be by far the biggest, since they have lots of their own silicon, while most other people are limited by what NVidia can make or smallish amounts of custom silicon. If Google can't turn that into a commercial product, the researchers don't really care.
- garblegarble 3y ago
  >Most researchers aren't there to make a commercial product. They're there to publish well-cited research papers, talk at top conferences, and have access to far more compute than anyone else can offer. I think that's core to what I'm getting at - I don't see how Google continues to let them publish core research at this point given how much of a lead they've given their competitors (especially combined with their own inability to execute)
  - leereeves 3y ago

Karupan 3y ago

Is this google indirectly admitting that it cannot compete in the current AI landscape (e.g bard), or is it just to keep OpenAI in check by funding its closest competitor?

teleforce 3y ago
Really surprised that Google didn't outright buy OpenAI perhaps the price is already too much now even for Google. Previously, Google has no problem buying direct competitors to its products for example Youtube and Waze. ChatGPT with Bing search is just very good, intuitive and convenient that I highly recommend it if you have not tried it. Imagine a version of ChatGPT that has tight integration with Google Search, Google Scholar, Google Patent, Google Books, Google Deepmind, etc. Early last year or so I've read that people were lamenting on how Google at the time was struggling to monetize Deepmind products and suddenly OpenAI ChatGPT 3 came and changed the game forever, while the game changing algorithm is right under their nose, so to speak. It's quite telling that none of the original authors of the Attention paper is still with Google for now. To showcase the powerful nature of ChatGPT 4 with Bing search I've queried where the original authors of the Attention paper are working now and the answers are as follows: "As of 2023, here are the current affiliations or recent activities of the original authors of the "Attention is All You Need" paper: Ashish Vaswani: Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Adept AI Noam Shazeer: Co-founder and CEO of Character.AI Niki Parmar: While there isn't specific information about Niki Parmar's current affiliation, it's known that both Vaswani and Parmar were authors at Google when the paper was published in 2017 Jakob Uszkoreit: CEO and co-founder of Inceptive Nucleics, Inc Llion Jones: Left Google Japan in July 2023 to launch a startup, Sakana AI, alongside David Ha, the former head of Google's AI research arm in Japan Aidan N. Gomez: CEO & Co-founder of Cohere, a company focused on Natural Language Processing (NLP) Lukasz Kaiser: The search for Lukasz Kaiser's current affiliation did not yield relevant results. Further research may be required to find his current affiliation. It's also noted that many of the co-authors have left Google to start their own ventures or joined other organizations since the publication of the paper."
- vitus 3y ago
  > Lukasz Kaiser: The search for Lukasz Kaiser's current affiliation did not yield relevant results. Further research may be required to find his current affiliation. The Lukasz Kaiser who's been at OpenAI since 2021? https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukaszkaiser I know it's popular on HN to give Google crap about having bad search results these days and to use ChatGPT instead, but this was literally the first Google search result for me. IMO it's especially embarrassing that Bing (owned by Microsoft) was unable to find Lukasz Kaiser via LinkedIn (also owned by Microsoft). That said: native Bing Search gets it right: Lukasz Kaiser | LinkedIn Connections: 500+ Followers: 5.3K Works For: OpenAI (obligatory disclaimer that Google pays me money in exchange for work that has nothing to do with AI/ML, so let that inform how you read my post)

kleene_op 3y ago

Those who can't do.. pay.

jsemrau 3y ago

I guess the main driver here is gaining control / influence ?

rawrawrawrr 3y ago

$6 billion dollars raised in 2 months for their series C is blowing my mind. What does Anthropic have that OpenAI or other LLM startups don't? What other companies have raised that much in a single round?

quickthrower2 3y ago
Gotta be the talent. Started by ex-OpenAI and probably attracted some AI geniuses who buy in to their safety approach too.
- mptest 3y ago
  joking, but maybe they have achieved agi (internally) ;)
  - schleck8 3y ago
    OpenAI is said to have done so by a guy who leaked some very specific information that turned out to be accurate.
Varloom 3y ago
It's absolutely good, have you tried their Claude 2 AI?
- polymorph1sm 3y ago
  It’s not as good as GPT-4, the only feature I used often was their PDF QA. The rest ChatGPT plus ( GPT-4 ) still miles ahead
  - lambdaba 3y ago
    I regularly compare queries with both GPT-4 and Claude 2 and I find I prefer Claude's answers most often. The 100k token context is a major plus too. Claude is more creative and that comes with a higher rate of hallucinations. I hope I'm not misremembering but GPT-4 was also initially more prone to hallucinations but also more capable in some ways.

throwaway2990 3y ago

They don’t have much confidence. Microsoft invested 10b into OpenAI. That investment seems to be paying off well.

cryptoz 3y ago

Can’t risk losing the AI war entirely. Much better to be embarrassed to the tune of $2B than to have no profits from future AI success.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

simonswords82 3y ago

I'd love to see the statistics on the daily number of Google searches since OpenAI (ChatGPT in particular) came to the fore this year. Anecdotally, I now use ChatGPT for at least 25-50% of the queries that I previously would have had no other channel for other than a search engine. If I was in charge of Alphabet I'd be starting to worry. This move makes them look a bit desperate.

dalbasal 3y ago
The types of queries where gpt is useful (or I hope will soon be useful) to me are those where google themselves have "destroyed the internet.^" If you want to basic information about a physical exercise, a recipe, a travel destination or such... All the content in Google seems to be content farmed. Written by people who don't know, quickly, by copying similar articles. It's just a buggy, manual version of the proverbial gpt anyway. At this point, I may as well just go direct. If I want to know about doing weighted crunches instead of sit ups, Google results already represent all the downsides of using gpt. The got UI is nicer. You can also narrow in on your questions, push back and generally get the same level of content in a better package. Maybe the old chestnut of "computerized recipe book" will finally be solved. ^Ra Ra!
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > All the content in Google seems to be content farmed you are just forgetting to add word "reddit" at the end of your query..
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    That doesn’t help and is just as astroturfed at this point. Companies caught on to this years ago
    - riku_iki 3y ago
      that's very far from my experience, mods and voting community do great job in ranking good posts and comments. Maybe you can give example of your query which you are not satisfied with results?

soniman 3y ago

FTX Anthropic worth a lot now or has it been diluted ?

crypt1d 3y ago
Worth a lot. It probably would have been enough to plug the hole from stealing customer funds, if he managed to stay afloat for a few more months. Ah, the irony.
- k4rli 3y ago
  What happened to their shares? Just sold to cover claims?
  - crypt1d 3y ago
    from what I know, they still have their stake, but they will eventually sell it
- diamondfist25 3y ago
  Hope ftx bankruptcy CEO can make it whole for the customers. 80% of my nw is stuck there
  - edgyquant 3y ago
    Why is 80% of your net worth in FTX

Varloom 3y ago

That means all the work they did on their own AI has failed. So they are buying someone else's AI.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Or it means they have more money than they know what to do with so they're throwing it at any de-risking they can find

Bishonen88 3y ago

Funny, seeing that Amazon seems to be dipping their toes in the same water. https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-announce-strategic-collaboration-to-advance-generative-ai https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/9/amazon-and-anthropic-an...

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
It’s about as close as one can get to an acquisition, no?
mrkramer 3y ago
Didn't Amazon invest in Google in the Google's early days? Now Google is returning the favor by saying: "Look FTC and DOJ, we are not a monopolist, web users prefer Amazon over Google when they search for products to buy."

foxhop 3y ago

I'm using LLMs at my day job and claude v2 getting close to gpt-4's intelligence. It does use a different prompting style and has a huge 100,000 context window so it expects multishot prompting to train the LLM just-in-time.

lambdaba 3y ago
I've recently subscribed too. The huge context window is a game-changer and I can't wait for API access. Unfortunately it hallucinates a lot. It's amazing for extracting information out of large documents, altough doing so made me realize how limited current models are in terms of detecting "subtleties" that would be obvious to a human.
- foxhop 3y ago
  I have API access using AWS Bedrock which is hosted claude v2. boto3 has a client to trigger the completions but I've been practicing using just the playground in AWS console.
  - lambdaba 3y ago
    Thanks, I've requested access, how long did it take for you? Update: access already granted!
lambdaba 3y ago
BTW what do you mean by "different prompting style"?
- foxhop 3y ago
  https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/constructing-a-prompt
- foxhop 3y ago
  Human: I have a message and I need to categorize it into the right bucket. Can you help? General Inquiry Feedback & Suggestions Technical Issues Billing & Payments Appointments & Scheduling Others return only JSON like {"category": "Technical Issues"} Assistant: Sure using just JSON! Human: The app freezes every time I launch it. Assistant: {"category": "Technical Issues"} Human: I think your platform could use a night mode feature. Assistant: {"category": "Feedback & Suggestions"} Human: How do I reschedule my consultation? Assistant: {"category": "Appointments & Scheduling"} Human: I don't like the new open layout. Assistant: {"category": "Feedback & Suggestions"}

LightBug1 3y ago

I'm confused. Ok, Bard isn't cutting edge but it's pretty damned good for every day stuff ... and I actually detest Google ... but I've been using it because I'm sick of Edge on my PC and I think the UI is just 'friendlier' and quicker. N=1

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nacs 3y ago
Sorry but Bard is terrible and Google knows it. They've already announced a replacement / better model coming but considering how long Google has been doing the AI thing, it's amazing they dropped the ball this badly. This investment is Claude sounds like their backup plan.
- fastball 3y ago
  Google literally invented the Transformer architecture, so yes, an impressive dropping of the ball.
wenc 3y ago
If you've used the competition (ChatGPT, Claude, even Perplexity free version), you will find that Bard is not good in terms of quality of answers. (I'm forced to use Bard at work. The UI is responsive I'll give you that, but the answers are often more wrong than ChatGPT and Claude)
staticman2 3y ago
Bard is so stupid that I tried the take a picture feature, asked a question about a picture, then when I asked a followup question about the picture it said "Sorry I can't look at pictures." I do expect it to get much smarter by the end of next year.
- antifa 3y ago
  I asked bard to make a comparison chart of OpenAI, Claude, and PaLM's specs (size and context window) and it repeatedly gave me a nice looking table with obviously wrong values.

qwertox 3y ago

Can't wait for the day where it makes sense to export all my ChatGPT history and import it into Google's competition product in order for them to customize my experience. At this point Google is offering nothing which comes close to ChatGPT, Bard is a laughing stock compared to it. But I don't doubt that Google will catch up and then offer a better experience. The only thing OpenAI has from me is that (valuable) chat history (and the monthly subscription money), so I wouldn't have any problems with moving away from them once they are no longer in the unique position they're currently in. This is different with Google, which has several orders of magnitude more data about me and which they also do manage for me. I'm concerned that it's only a matter of time until OpenAi gets hacked and some of the user account's data gets leaked.

ep_jhu 3y ago
There’s already been hacks with 100k user account data leaked: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-100-000-chatgpt-accounts-stolen-via-info-stealing-malware/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-100-000-... OpenAI says it was an issue with the user devices not their service, though.
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k4rli 3y ago
What's the actual big gain of having history? I have it enabled as well and I sometimes jump back into old chats but it's mostly not so useful.
- kmlx 3y ago
  the big gain is for long running queries. i had to refactor a big codebase and i went back to the same conversation numerous times over the course of a month. of course it would sometimes lose context, but having it all in the same place made things very easy for me.

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GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
That's not really that high, maybe for the UK, but again not unheard of
- calderknight 3y ago
  It's very, very high for the UK, but pretty normal for the USA.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    For a remote IT job? It’s not unheard of, but no that’s not normal (I guess depending on what “IT job” actually means).
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      When I hear IT job I imagine moving 12 dell desktops on a moving cart across a campus for $50k a year
      - ravetcofx 3y ago
        For 250k I imagine it's a very stressful sysAdmin/DevOps position where they're expected to be Jack of all trades.
        ethanbond 3y ago
        Or it’s a startup with shitloads of cash that’s willing to overpay, as indicated by the person’s immediately preceding salary.
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Taranis 3y ago

Amazon recently annouced their investment in Anthropic as well. Two, of the largest ad providers on the planet. Invest in the competition so you can have "input" into various aspects of the company, all the while profitting on any sucess.

edgyquant 3y ago
I generally agree with this sentiment, but Anthropic has agency and have deemed it acceptable to grant these companies some control.
- ttul 3y ago
  There may be some interest in having access to Google’s machine learning hardware as well. What we don’t know publicly is the extent of any deals these companies have to share technology and infrastructure. Google is one of the only hyperscalers to have succeeded in building its own ML hardware. That’s a key asset.

HlessClaudesman 3y ago

Amzoogle. Coining it here for the benefit of our future Amzooverlords.

javajosh 3y ago
"Googazon" has a better ring to it, IMHO.
- mmmm2 3y ago
  Seems to capture the scale and ridiculousness as well.
  - pxeger1 3y ago
    Amagongle?
- wseqyrku 3y ago
  Ok, Amzoogoogazongle
  - malfist 3y ago
    One of amazon's leadership principles is "Think Big" why stop at amazon and google? I propose Amzoogoogazonglezure. Don't ask me how to pronounce it.
  - javajosh 3y ago
    Or perhaps AmazonGoogleKleinerPerkinsKlaxoGoldmanSachs GmbH
- hughesjj 3y ago
  "alphazon" "Amabet"

neom 3y ago

Wonder if Anthropic could end up making FTX shareholders whole given SBF invested quite bit into them a while ago.

olalonde 3y ago
That and the crypto bull market. Imagine being SBF and knowing you could have avoided decades in jail if only you hadn't filed for bankruptcy.
- valyagolev 3y ago
  this happened to him several times, and each time he ended up betting it all again. if anthropic would make him whole, he'd bet it all on more bullshit crypto
- da-bacon 3y ago
  If you rob a bank and then win the lottery, you still robbed the bank.
  - loeg 3y ago
    Yeah, but also, if the hole is $0 vs $8 billion, you probably get less jail time.
    - fastball 3y ago
      Don't be too sure, that's not how it played out for Martin Shkreli.
      - loeg 3y ago
        We can never know the outcome of the counterfactual scenario for Shkreli.
  - chipgap98 3y ago
    Totally agree but it is a strange situation. Everyone will probably be made whole now

danielovichdk 3y ago

Does anyone know what clauses OpenAI workers work under in terms of competition trying to pick them up and win them over? I still don't see any competition to what openai has done and so I expect some heavy rivalry coming up

xyst 3y ago

I wonder what the burn rate is for these AI companies. $2b is a shit ton of money but I can easily see it quickly draining with a large team of devs, data scientists, SREs, and misc costs such as specialty hardware and cloud costs.

skizm 3y ago
There was an article a while ago about how it costs OpenAI around $700,000 per day to operate. Could be north of $1M / day now.
- fastball 3y ago
  That's still only $365M per year – $2B would last you 5+ years.
- lukevp 3y ago
  Even at $1M/day, the 3 billion from Amazon and Google would last 3000 days, which is ~8.2 years. Nothing to sneeze at! And that’s assuming they make no money themselves, which would extend the runway. A billion is a lot of money. I always accidentally think of it as 100 million instead of a thousand million for some reason.
- kubrickslair 3y ago
  They are also have a $1B+ annual run rate [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-track-generate-more-than-1-bln-revenue-over-12-months-information-2023-08-29/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-track-generate-mor...
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- typon 3y ago
  Even though 1M/day sounds like a lot, $10B (their funding from Microsoft) would last them 27 years at this rate.
gtirloni 3y ago
Right now, it's mostly hardware costs.

mechanicker 3y ago

Could it be more to prevent monopoly by their competitor Amazon becoming the biggest investor? OpenAI gave Microsoft a competitive edge and this could just be a hedge to prevent Amazon from getting even further ahead.

johnwheeler 3y ago

Google and their also-ran AI. Pichai is the lame duck CEO, Brin and Page are the lame duck founders. Hassabis is a lego nerd. Company hasn’t done shit but shutter products and piss people off, and the search engine is working about as good as AltaVista circa 1999. Google employees downvoting me

CuriouslyC 3y ago
I don't get how Pichai isn't in the crosshairs right now, he must be good at bullshitting the board and shareholders, because things have very clearly been going downhill under his leadership.

Andrew018 3y ago

[dead]

ta988 3y ago

They have no choice their internal models are just ridiculously bad compared to OpenAI. The behemoth is so fat it can't move anymore, this doesn't sound good for the company as a whole and the only thing that keep them afloat is that they are paying to be the default on devices.

grammers 3y ago

Google paid $26 billion in 2021 to become the default search engine on browsers and phones - $2B is peanuts to them.

riku_iki 3y ago

Anthropic will be interesting company if founders lost voting power in the board, with FTX, Amazon and Google representatives arguing to each other on key decisions protecting their interests.

jasondclinton 3y ago
We announced our board structure here: https://www.anthropic.com/index/the-long-term-benefit-trust https://www.anthropic.com/index/the-long-term-benefit-trust Quoting: """The Trust is an independent body of five financially disinterested members with an authority to select and remove a portion of our Board that will grow over time (ultimately, a majority of our Board). Paired with our Public Benefit Corporation status, the LTBT helps to align our corporate governance with our mission of developing and maintaining advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity."""
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > to select and remove a portion of our Board and how large is that portion?
caddemon 3y ago
Who is the FTX representative at this point?
- riku_iki 3y ago
  there is some custodian of their assets for sure.

nextworddev 3y ago

If anything this is a signal that there’s hiccups with Gemini GA or performance

outside1234 3y ago

So the internal effort to build a competitive AI product are going well?

Jackson__ 3y ago

Huh, this together with their "Gemini" AI product still not being released does not paint a good picture of progress at the Google DeepMind Team.

donor20 3y ago
Are they the ones doing Bard? I’ve got a ChatGPT subscription but interested in trying googles product but it says my workspace hadn’t enabled bard yet
- gzer0 3y ago
  You should be able to use Bard with a non-workspace account. Any personal gmail/google account should be able to go directly to https://bard.google.com https://bard.google.com and agree to the terms and enroll.
  - scrivna 3y ago
    Claude nor Bard are available in Canada shrug

slowhadoken 3y ago

I feel like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park rn

taf2 3y ago

I hope anthropic improves their api with this money. Having usage information from OpenAI is very nice. Their ai is really good just need to improve their features to support commercial usage

gzer0 3y ago

In my experience, claude.ai outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT in several key areas. Notably, claude.ai excels in long-tail document reading and recall, demonstrating superior comprehension and information retrieval. Additionally, claude.ai offers enhanced contextual understanding, allowing it to provide more relevant and precise responses. However, while Claude.ai certainly showcases its strengths in specific areas, it doesn't quite measure up to OpenAI's ChatGPT in terms of adaptability and precision. ChatGPT stands out for its capability to understand intricate queries and produce nuanced, tailored responses. Both platforms have distinct strengths; I firmly believe they'll evolve to dominate different niches in the AI ecosystem.

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
I’ve had the opposite experience. Soon after claude 2 came out, i pasted in a long document that started with the document’s title and it couldn’t answer a “what is the title?” question.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> In my experience, claude.ai outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT in several key areas. ChatGPT on GPT-3.5? I can buy this. GPT-4? No fucking way. If Claude got anywhere close, this would be front page news in every tech and tech-adjacent outlet. This has to be said again and again: "ChatGPT" is meaningless without specifying whether you mean GPT-3.5 or GPT-4; statements about "ChatGPT" (or LLMs in general) capability limits are invalid unless tested on GPT-4.
- gzer0 3y ago
  I have been using GPT since the inception of GPT-2. You're correct, I should have specified. I rarely if ever use GPT-3.5. I have 7 paid / premium accounts, and I primarily use GPT-4.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  OpenAI does this disservice to themselves by paywalling GPT-4 and not 3.5, under the umbrella of "ChatGPT".
- 3y ago

nuancebydefault 3y ago

Even though Claude sounds French, it seems it is not directly accessible from European countries? I'd love to give it a spin.

xmglgpeldmg 3y ago

Is there any significance in Google proper making the investment rather than another arm of Alphabet?

jklinger410 3y ago

Anthropic and Claude are signals to me that Artificial Intelligence will be a captured technology before it actually becomes useful. Google investing in Anthropic shows that their priorities are on the capture over the usefulness. Because that's all that Claude really is.